feeling listless

H2G2 I know this has already been heavily circulated but just in case anyone did miss it, the screenwriter that isn't Douglas on the new film interviewed himself for the official site's weblog. Here is an example of his approach to the material:

"Next, I read the book with pen and highlighter in hand, underlining passages that had been left out that I wanted to try to get back in and making notes on characters and themes that were present in the book but not really playing as well as they could in the screenplay. I was going to watch the TV show, but Jay suggested that I not do that, just so that I wouldn?t have any of those images in my head. The idea was to try to create something rather than re-create (and I don?t think we have the rights to any new material created specifically for the TV show, so for that reason, I never watched it. Do you hear me BBC? I NEVER WATCHED THE TV SERIES). I did, however, buy a book that had the scripts for the radio plays. When I started writing, I had the novel on one side of my G4 laptop and the radio play scripts on the other side. They are both well-worn."

Overall it's a staggeringly long, revealing and passionate self justification which just about wins me over that he does know what he's doing. On hearing that people would be doing re-writes I was petrified that I wouldn't recognise any of the dialogue (some of which Adams carried from media to media to media --"What's so terrible about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water...") but most of what Kirkpatrick has done is structural. As Douglas said the main problem with turning the thing into a film is that you destroy the Earth at the end of the first act -- where do you go from there? Maybe we'll finally have the answer...